2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

An anthropologist, novelist, producer of sound recordings, film and stage director, choreographer and more, Zora Neale Hurston exemplified the unexpected yet necessary crossover between artist, scholar, and community worker that contemporary women of color scholars and theorists still pursue. This roundtable centers Hurston’s multiform methods by bringing literary studies into conversation with sound studies and performance studies to examine how experiments in form and disciplinary transgression shaped Hurston’s modes of expression, body of work, and legacy. Roundtable participants Daphne Brooks, Sara Clarke Kaplan, Roshanak Kheshti, and Sonya Posmentier are each currently researching Hurston’s work in sound, performance, and text. Together at this roundtable, they will draw on the framework of crossroads, crossovers, and mixed methods to explore a set of topics, including: the ‘environmental archive’ constituted at the intersection of the sonic and the textual in Hurston’s fiction; the ‘synthetic hermeneutics’ enacted by Hurston’s shape-shifting across methods and media; and the disciplinary and categorical transgressions necessitated by Hurston’s writings on the performative power of African Diaspora practice. The panel is moderated by Smith College Associate Professor of Africana Studies Daphne Lamothe, whose influential book Inventing the New Negro: Narrative, Culture and Ethnography explores the influence Hurston’s training as an anthropologist has had on her literary productions.